We find ourselves in challenging times.

The COVID-19 virus has impacted just about every citizen of the world. The fear that once crept in has morphed into panic for some. The questions have piled on.

They started with the immediate health concerns: Will I contract the novel coronavirus ? Will an elder in my family contract it ?

They moved to concerns over lifestyle changes: How will I find the food and supplies I’ll need ? Can I still take upcoming trips ? Will my stocks rebound ? When will this end ?

Work has been especially impacted. Some employees – at hospitals and research facilities – are working around the clock. Some – who were employed at restaurants and gyms – are out of work altogether. For many others, working from home indefinitely has become the norm.

In this new environment, there has never been a more important time for personal employee connections. These are the relationships that lead to greater business success. During the pandemic, they move people from a feeling of fear to one of trust.

In the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, we have seen the highest-ever client activity on the CultureHQ platform. The nature of this activity has informed our guide below. Please use it to harness the new opportunities for meaningful connection during this time.

Virtual Events

Compulsory events like company meetings and team brainstorms have long been a pillar of remote work. But, during today’s pandemic, additional group events provide a tremendous outlet for deeper connections.

Events like virtual yoga, virtual happy hour, virtual lunch, and other communal-like programs help employees see their colleagues as friends. This is critical during a time of limited opportunity to meet friends after work at restaurants and bars. With traditional friendship at a premium, employees’ colleagues can help to fill this void.

The key is to get creative and provide virtual outlets for employees to leverage their interests and passions. This approach goes a long way in forming more personal relationships among peers. We’ve seen unique ideas like group cooking sessions, guitar lessons, and guided meditation.

Standard team meetings also provide a chance to learn about colleagues. Opening a meeting by asking for a quick tour of someone’s remote work setup, an intro to their pet, or to share something they’re grateful for, all go a long way toward a more human connection.

CultureHQ’s event feature is designed to manage and measure all activities, events, and programs deployed by an organization for its employees. Events seamlessly integrate with Slack, Email, Outlook, Google Calendar, and single sign-on. Any employee may create an engaging event for colleagues with a Zoom meeting link as the location. Comments, cheering, photos, and a robust post-event survey system comprise the unique CultureHQ event experience.

Specialized Individual Connections

One-on-one interactions hold an important place in the typical workday. Outside of scheduled meetings, these moments of catching up by the water cooler or chatting at a colleague’s desk are a crucial part of the work social life. They also provide important refreshing breaks throughout the course of a workday.

But at home amid the COVID-19 outbreak, employees are deprived of these unscripted moments of catch-up. And during a period of quarantine and social distancing, there are few impromptu moments that re-energize employees during the day.

However, the ability to virtually connect one-on-one with a colleague who isn’t a close friend provides a necessary boost during a structured day at home. We thus recommend that organizations implement a specialized matching program to pair employees for virtual coffee meetings.

In this type of program, some employee matches offer more potential than others. We’ve found that the best connections come when there exists a level of commonality between the two colleagues. This overlap might include professional goals and experiences or personal interests and passions.

Intentional matching by an organization may even surface commonalities that would not otherwise have been discovered in person. These shared attributes provide helpful points of conversation and allow colleagues to form deeper personal connections.

Creating new relationships at work is a gratifying endeavor. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it is a privilege, reminding employees that the access they have to colleagues makes their organization a special, exclusive club.

The Smart Connections feature in CultureHQ is predicated on the belief that connecting over shared personal and professional attributes builds a stronger human rapport. The feature uses AI to learn more about employees and carefully matches them in one-on-one pairings. After meeting, CultureHQ prompts employees to post about their meetings and highlight colleagues’ interests and skills.

Meaningful Conversations

Promoting conversations that foster community is a necessity during a prolonged setback like the current pandemic. But instead of resorting to the fire hose of a standard communication channel, establish a separate, centralized dialogue for employees.

This dialogue should have a singular purpose: to be the intentional place for all colleagues to come together during a difficult time. It will provide the opportunity for employees to contribute their thoughts and quickly learn about many peers at once.

Discussions to engage colleagues should be personal in nature. We’ve seen prompts asking about books people are reading, music they’re enjoying, favorite quotes, go-to karaoke songs, first jobs they’ve held, and photos of their pets and home offices. The personal nature of these questions allows employees to quickly build trust and establishes a level playing field for all. No matter one’s title or location, every employee has something to say.

The cadence of the prompts is also important. Depending on the workforce, they may range from daily to weekly. Regardless, it is clear that employees are eager to connect, to bond, and to contribute toward things they are passionate about. This increased willingness to share on a more personal level is a silver lining of forced remote work. The system works best when both executives and other employees are empowered to create the dialogue prompts.

CultureHQ’s meaningful conversations allow all employees to contribute in a centralized dialogue. Its unique tagging feature enables employees to bring more colleagues into the conversation. Employees also have the ability to upload photos and GIFs, share links, and add and cheer comments. Organizations that use CultureHQ during the COVID-19 outbreak may also take advantage of a prescriptive list of prompts designed to engage employees and promote connection.

Programmatic Surveys

What better time to tap into employees via surveys than during the COVID-19 outbreak ? Surveys are an engaging tool that can be used in two helpful ways at this time.

First, surveys are beneficial as a supplement to the free-form posts in conversations. Some employees find it easier to answer questions when there are options presented in a single-response or multiple-choice format.

Survey questions that take these forms should be delivered in addition to conversation prompts. As with the nature of the conversation-style dialogue, these surveys should focus on engaging, personal questions that encourage connection. Allow employees to see their colleagues’ responses to each survey question, once they have completed it themselves.

Second, surveys are the critical tool to keep a pulse on employee sentiment during long periods of remote work. Beyond asking the standard engagement questions, be sure to hear from employees how they’re feeling about the work-from-home experience.

These questions are key to executive-level understanding and will uncover policies that need to be changed or adjusted. They also communicate to employees who may be working remotely for the first time that the company cares about their well-being and is listening to them – both elements critical to mutual affinity. Allow employees to submit only hidden responses here.

CultureHQ’s survey feature permits survey questions in five different forms. Administrators may allow any employee to create a survey. Each survey’s results may be hidden or shown to an employee upon completion. For organizations that use Slack, new surveys may be announced via a Slack post. Those that adopt CultureHQ during the COVID-19 outbreak will find a templated list of surveys in draft mode, ready for deployment.

Opportunity In Chaos

During the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, we saw our highest-ever client activity in the CultureHQ platform. We also observed new ways in which the platform was being used. This was tangible evidence of the critical need for human connections during this unusual time.

As we’ve learned, organizations that build and maintain deeper employee relationships have higher rates of success. With employees’ demonstrable needs to connect in more personal ways during the pandemic, organizations have been afforded a golden opportunity.

Use this period of difficulty to create meaningful connections among employees that will endure and continue to build on themselves in the months ahead.

The CultureHQ COVID-19 Survival Guide